Turbine Control Strategies for Wind Farm Power Optimization

In recent decades there has been increasing interest in green energies, of which wind energy is the most important one. In order to improve the competitiveness of the wind power plants, there are ongoing researches to decrease cost per energy unit and increase the efficiency of wind turbines and wind farms.

One way of achieving these goals is to optimize the power generated by a wind farm. One optimization method is to choose appropriate operating points for the individual wind turbines in the farm. We have made three models of a wind farm based on three difference control strategies. Basically, the control strategies determine the steady state operating points of the wind turbines.

Except the control strategies of the individual wind turbines, the wind farm models are similar. Each model consists of a row of 5MW reference wind turbines. In the models we are able to optimize the generated power by changing the power reference of the individual wind turbines. We use the optimization setup to compare power production of the wind farm models.

This paper shows that for the most frequent wind velocities (below and around the rated values), the generated powers of the wind farms are different. This means that choosing an appropriate control strategy for the individual wind turbines will result in an increased power production of the wind farm.